Of an evening five or six well-to-do citizens would enter the front room and play at dominoes there.  Although Cartier was dead and the Cafe de Paris had got a queer name, they saw nothing and kept up their old habits.  In course of time, the waiter having nothing to do, Melanie dismissed him and made Phrosine light the solitary gas burner in the corner where the domino players congregated.  Occasionally a party of young men, attracted by the gossip that circulated through the town, would come in, wildly excited and laughing loudly and awkwardly.  But they were received there with icy dignity.  As a rule they did not even see the widow, and even if she happened to be present she treated them with withering disdain, so that they withdrew, stammering and confused.  Melanie was too astute to indulge in any compromising whims.  While the front room remained obscure, save in the corner where the few townsfolk rattled their dominoes, she personally waited on the gentlemen of the divan, showing herself amiable without being free, merely venturing in moments of familiarity to lean on the shoulder of one or another of them, the better to watch a skillfully played game of ecarte.

One evening the gentlemen of the divan, who had ended by tolerating each other’s presence, experienced a disagreeable surprise on finding Captain Burle at home there.  He had casually entered the cafe that same morning to get a glass of vermouth, so it seemed, and he had found Melanie there.  They had conversed, and in the evening when he returned Phrosine immediately showed him to the inner room.

Two days later Burle reigned there supreme; still he had not frightened the chemist, the vermicelli maker, the lawyer or the retired magistrate away.  The captain, who was short and dumpy, worshiped tall, plump women.  In his regiment he had been nicknamed “Petticoat Burle” on account of his constant philandering.  Whenever the officers, and even the privates, met some monstrous-looking creature, some giantess puffed out with fat, whether she were in velvet or in rags, they would invariably exclaim, “There goes one to Petticoat Burle’s taste!” Thus Melanie, with her opulent presence, quite conquered him.  He was lost—­quite wrecked.  In less than a fortnight he had fallen to vacuous imbecility.  With much the expression of a whipped hound in the tiny sunken eyes which lighted up his bloated face, he was incessantly watching the widow in mute adoration before her masculine features and stubby hair.  For fear that he might be dismissed, he put up with the presence of the other gentlemen of the divan and spent his pay in the place down to the last copper.  A sergeant reviewed the situation in one sentence:  “Petticoat Burle is done for; he’s a buried man!”

It was nearly ten o’clock when Major Laguitte furiously flung the door of the cafe open.  For a moment those inside could see the deluged square transformed into a dark sea of liquid mud, bubbling under the terrible downpour.  The major, now soaked to the skin and leaving a stream behind him, strode up to the small counter where Phrosine was reading a novel.